Beneath “The Bipolar Rainbow”
A colorful metaphor for the experience of living with bipolar disorder
What is it like to experience the dizzying highs of mania and the despondent lows of depression that characterize bipolar disorder type I? I attempted to offer a glimpse into my world when I published my poem, The Bipolar Rainbow, on May 12 of this year. This marked the first time I shared my diagnosis and my creative writing broadly.
Using the colors red and blue as metaphors for mania and depression, respectively, I endeavored to get across the feelings I experience when in the throes of an episode.
What is Bipolar Disorder?
First, I’d like to explain what bipolar disorder is and what it is not. It is certainly not simply feeling moody or changing your mind frequently. Flightiness does not equal bipolar disorder. Rather, bipolar disorder is a complex mood disorder marked by drastic changes in energy, behavior, thoughts, and mood over the course of days, weeks, or months. It is thought to disrupt or result from, in part, disruptions to the circadian rhythm. I have been diagnosed with bipolar disorder type I with rapid cycling and psychosis.
Allow me to break that down for you. Bipolar disorder type I features major manic episodes that are serious enough to impair day-to-day living or that require inpatient hospitalization. This is in contrast with bipolar disorder type II, which is marked by deeper and longer bouts of depression and hypomanic episodes that are not as debilitating as mania. I was first diagnosed with bipolar II, but once I experienced my first manic episode resulting in involuntary hospitalization, the diagnosis was quickly changed to type I.
I also mentioned rapid cycling, defined by the roller coaster experience of four or more mood episodes a year. Finally, psychosis, a break from reality that can include hallucinations (sensing phenomena that are not present in real life) and delusions (seriously warped ideas that have no basis in reality) was a part of my mania. It is often thought that only people with schizophrenia experience psychosis, but it can actually be a part of many different mental illnesses, including mania and depression.
It is the presence or absence of mania that warrants a diagnosis of bipolar disorder type I. Severe depression can be, and most likely is, also present in cases of bipolar disorder type I but does not necessarily have to be present.
The Bipolar Rainbow
The color wheel,
In all its cheery definition,
Would have you think
That the opposite of red is green.
The truth is not so berry merry
For those who cannot feel all the colors.
As only we with bipolar disorder can know,
Red’s true opposite is blue, and
These colors are the only two in the rainbow:
One part the blue of the deepest ocean,
Of the eldest glacier,
Of the darkest midnight,
Of the purest desperation.
We swim in it,
Struggling to keep our heads
Above the spray
Long enough to breathe
Without sinking.
What to make of red then?
Red bends and bedevils.
Lifting us off the ground into a fire whirl,
Spinning madly with the hottest flame,
The marriage of red to blue exhilarating to behold
But terrifyingly injurious to experience.
However,
Like the blue and red of a horseshoe magnet,
There is a balance to be struck,
A middle to be found,
The capability of a soft stability
That adds more colors to the rainbow of life.
How Does “The Bipolar Rainbow” Depict Bipolar Disorder?
The Bipolar Rainbow begins by expressing that the opposite of red is blue and that these are the only two colors in the rainbow for people with bipolar disorder. This is because when one is feeling blue (depressed) or red (manic), each episode is an all-consuming thing. And especially when one is experiencing rapid cycling from one mood to another, it feels like one’s moods are all the reality that exists.
When I am experiencing depression, it goes beyond “the blues,” although I am using the color to represent it. It feels like drowning in the most blue that has ever been, hence the superlatives that flow into the next stanza. I am always afraid that the blue will overtake me like waves in the sea, and I won’t survive. Popular statistics put the rate of suicide among people with bipolar disorder at between four and nineteen percent, and suicide is attempted by between twenty-five and sixty percent of people with bipolar disorder.
Mania is quite literally maddening, and for me, it brings with it the scary symptoms of psychosis. I have heard voices instructing me to do things and believed grandiose, impossible things about myself and my place in the world. The manic me likes to light my life on fire, razing family, friendships, money, career plans, life goals, and a functioning self to the ground. I become too wild and windswept to care for myself. Specifically, symptoms like an overflow of ideas, verbal diarrhea, hypersexuality, and hyperreligiosity make it apparent to anyone I speak to that something’s off.
The marriage of red to blue that mirrors the appearance of the hottest flame represents the constancy of mood episodes when rapid cycling. During these time periods, there is no euthymia (a baseline or “normal” mood), instead I am flung from one extreme to the next. There are even mixed episodes in which symptoms of mania and depression present at the same time. This is dangerous because it can combine the hopelessness of depression with the restless energy of mania, leaving me to experience suicidal ideation and increased goal directed and physical activity at the same time. Suicide could easily occur.
I go on to describe mania as a force that consumes me until there is nothing left. Following my manic episodes are depressive episodes in which I have been left completely empty headed and empty handed. Mania borrows against energy and euphoria from the future and burns it all at once, leaving me drained and dejected.
The final stanza of The Bipolar Rainbow reflects what I have only learned with time and after some success at recovery: that there is a way to find balance between the episodic states of mania and depression.
This balance allows me to focus on other aspects of my life beside my disorder, ushering in other colors beyond the red and blue that are mania and depression.
Through the hard work of talk therapy, medication changes, and developing coping mechanisms, a support system, and hobbies, I have watched my own personal rainbow of life grow vibrant with color.
